The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss is an up to date classic fantasy tale that captures the heart and imagination through honest storytelling. The main character, Kvothe, is a bright young man, stumbling through the world as he attempts to support himself alone, and pay for his education. Where other fantasy books would not focus on the suffering of the main character and his very human needs, Rothfuss wants the reader to know that real life is messy, and even if you are a gifted individual, it does not mean you won’t have your shares of set backs. We have a main character that we can relate to because our life isn’t perfect and even though Kvothe is our hero, neither is his life.

This is a character based story, my favorite kind. We learn about the world as Kvothe learns about it. There is very little exposition that doesn’t seem natural and Rothfuss succeeds admirably in that regards. The story is about a hero that everyone talks about but few know the real story. Chronicler, a historian, finds Kvothe, and asks him for his actual story to set the record straight. The chapters are mostly told in first person while Kvothe is telling the story but changes to third person in the scenes where Chronicler is transcribing the story.

It is very much an origin story, which I love. Kvothe was a part of a travelling troupe with his parents where he learned all sorts of things, especially from an arcanist that traveled with them as well. An arcanist is Rothfuss’ version of a wizard but more a scientist than anything. They are the keepers of knowledge that study at a place called The University. The magic system in The Name of the Wind is called sympathy where you form links with elements by using a small focusing piece of that element and an energy source. Learning about sympathy as a reader is delightful. Anyway, Kvothe ends up homeless, and alone after a group of men kill his entire troupe. For three years Kvothe is living on the street and his existence is so meager and disheartening. The reader becomes attached to Kvothe because of the pain he suffers. We want to see Kvothe overcome his obstacles. Eventually Kvothe ends up at The University and begins his studies. He can barely pay his tuition and living expenses, he makes mistakes and angers the wrong people, and is too strong willed for his own good. The story turns into Kvothe’s adventures and hardships at The University where one thing will go right but two things will go wrong. It is an amazing opening narrative to the Kingkiller Chronicles because we are living the story through or with Kvothe. At some point in the story, Kvothe becomes our friend, and that friendship is what powers the book.

I absolutely loved Rothfuss’ prose. He puts wise sayings that can be applied in our own life into his story as he applies it to Kvothe’s life. There are poetic and extremely quotable lines all through this book. In fact this is one of the most quotable fantasy books I’ve ever read. Here are some examples:

“Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.”

“Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain. Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need.

First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain. Sleep marks passing time, giving us distance from the things that have hurt us. When a person is wounded they will often fall unconscious. Similarly, someone who hears traumatic news will often swoon or faint. This is the mind’s way of protecting itself from pain by stepping through the first door.

Second is the door of forgetting. Some wounds are too deep to heal, or too deep to heal quickly. In addition, many memories are simply painful, and there is no healing to be done. The saying ‘time heals all wounds’ is false. Time heals most wounds. The rest are hidden behind this door.

Third is the door of madness. There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.

Last is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told.”

“Music is a proud, temperamental mistress. Give her the time and attention she deserves, and she is yours. Slight her and there will come a day when you call and she will not answer. So I began sleeping less to give her the time she needed.”

Also the stories and songs within the story are remarkable. Usually I don’t care for songs in a fantasy book but the songs in The Name of the Wind are on another level. Using songs and spoken-word stories was an ingenious way to talk about the history of the world without resorting to unnatural exposition. The best scene in the entire book is at the Eolian when Kvothe performs for his pipes. That was the highlight of the entire book because it was written so well that it moved me emotionally. The weakest part of the book was in the forest outside of Trebon. The scenes with Kvothe and Denna near Trebon didn’t hold my interest like the others.

I highly recommend The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss for those people that grew up on sword and sorcery fantasy books, people that want more character in their books, and people that want a break from grim-dark to experience classic fantasy told in a modern way. I enjoyed this book enough for me to order a signed hardcover that will be arriving in the mail. I cannot wait to read A Wise Man’s Fear. Kvothe is up there along with some of the great fantasy characters I have ever read. It does not hurt that Rothfuss is one of the best personalities in the fantasy genre today. I love his comments on everything from writing to the fantasy genre and when he is invited to panels he answers straight-forward.

This amazing hardcover coffee table book is just so gorgeous. The hardcover is a squishy hardcover that is great to feel. The letter and picture engraving on the front is embossed. The artwork inside is absolutely stupendous and as a fantasy art lover I would have gotten it just for the art alone. The detailed history of all the families and places is so great and I can’t wait to read it.

The Shining by Stephen King is one of his best books because it gets inside the reader’s head and asks difficult questions. These difficult questions are: How much control do I really have over myself? Could I actually hurt the people I love? Does my own temper have any similarities to Jack Torrance’s temper? What would you do for your family and when is it alright to walk away from bad circumstances? There are families and people like this in the world, down our street, and it is a little unsettling.

For me The Shining is a story about an imperfect man that we know everything about. King does an amazing job of building this family and telling us all of their fears. The funny thing is that the reader knows every intimate thought that they have about each other but they barely say anything to each other. Jack and Wendy’s marriage is one of fleeting looks of scorn, fear, and disdain but they never talk about what is going on in their marriage.

Danny, the son, has an ability to see things. He can read people’s emotions, their thoughts, see people that have died from violence, and project his thoughts to others. It is called the shining and it plays a much larger role in the book than it did in the movie. We get detailed accounts of what Danny sees and how he sees it. That last part is important because the how makes the book much more believable. He is a little kid trapped in a bad marriage and just desperately wants his parents to love each other and him.

The Overlook hotel, is where the main story takes place, as Jack becomes the caretaker of a large hotel for the winter. The hotel is cut off by snow during the winter months and someone has to stay up there to watch it all winter. The Overlook has a sordid past where murders and notorious people used to stay. Jack finding out all this information, and in turn the reader, is one of my favorite parts of the entire book. Through this information the hotel itself becomes a character because we learn all of its dark secrets just like we did the family.

The hotel starts to effect the family, Jack starts to become unraveled, his temper becoming worse, and Danny begins to see ghastly images, and disturbing occurrences everywhere he goes. Jack becomes unhinged and the hotel uses him to hurt his own family. This is the reason that The Shining is such a disturbing book and is looked at as one of the most scary books ever written, it is the father, flawed as he is, trying to kill his family. When it becomes someone that we know intimately through the entire story, it really ramps up the tension while flipping the pages.

What makes The Shining special is that the reader is deciding if Jack Torrance himself, and his personality, is the main culprit of his madness, or the hotel that has possessed him. I think depending on the person reading and their interpretation of the family dynamics plays a big part in deciding. Even though later in the book Wendy and Danny say multiple times say that Jack is not him anymore, there is still room for interpretation. I personally believe that Jack was influenced by the hotel but not possessed by the hotel. I think he desperately wanted something in his life to go well, to succeed, that when they offered him the chance to become the manager of the hotel, his ambitions got the best of him, and saw his family as a hindrance. His past and his temper were the instruments that the hotel used to persuade Jack into becoming this monster.

I find that tackling a book of a well known movie to be difficult at times. The reason I find it difficult is because there isn’t quite that desire to finish the book to find out what happens when you have seen the movie. I would have LOVED to of read The Shining before seeing the movie. The impact of some of the scenes would have been goose bumping intense. As it was, there was one moment when I did get goose bumps, and that was the reveal that redrum was murder backwards. Even though I knew it through the entire book, the scene is so well crafted, and Danny’s reaction is so great, that I couldn’t help have a response.

That was the only emotional or physical response I had from this book though. Having more than one of those responses is the difference for me between a book I like and a book I love. For that reason I decided to only give The Shining a 4/5 instead of a 5/5. I also have a hard time with Stephen King at times. He is one of the few where his profanity becomes annoying or distracting in the story. I’m not a huge King fan but I did enjoy this book. I hope to read the Dark Tower series of his some time.

This will be the last horror book for this October. Next year I hope to read I Am Legend and maybe Dracula.

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett strength lies in its world building, history, and the reader’s desire to unravel that history, but unfortunately the plot does not match the strength of the world building and the novel suffers because of that. I really wanted to like this book a lot but I feel that Bennett wanted to write three separate novels, each one suffering in quality because he tried to do too much. He tried to drive the novel by using mystery, world exploration, and characterization. If he would have focused on world exploration first, because his world is without a doubt the most interesting thing, the novel would of succeeded more admirably.

Most milieu or world building centered stories focus on a main character that is learning about the world as the reader is learning about the world. That way there is no awkward exposition instances in the novel explaining to the reader the world instead of showing the reader the world. City of Stairs starts out with the main character knowing more than anyone else in the world about the world, so a lot of the world building comes from exposition, and even flashbacks. During these flashback times, Bennett also focuses on the deeper characterization of our main characters. What results is a lot of explaining and very little doing for much of the book.

If the entire story would have been told through the eyes of Pitry, instead of Shara, where Pitry would have learned about the world while tagging along with Shara, and Sigrud, the result would have been more kind to the reader. It took me most of the book to get all the gods straight because the way they were described and introduced was murky. They were the most interesting part of the story yet it was difficult to discern between them until much later. If the gods could have been tied to actual scenes near the beginning of the book, so that the readers had an anchor point, it would have helped tremendously. I realize Bennett tried to do that but the other things got in the way.

Regardless of it’s faults I still thought City of Stairs was alright. The world is fascinating and I kept reading to learn more about the world. The mystery for me was always, “what is the truth of the past?”, and never “who killed the professor?”, because unraveling Bulikov, the gods, their interactions with the Continentals, and how the Saypuris won the war, were all so much more interesting than any plot line or character. In fact, at the end of the book, there was a moment when I was like, “oh yah, I forgot that someone killed that guy”, and that was the catalyst for the whole story.

The characters are likable as well. Shara, Vo, and Sigrud were all decent characters to read about. Sigrud’s back-story was the most satisfying of all of them and he ultimately was my favorite character. Most of the Shara and Vo relationship stuff could have been removed and the antagonist reveal was cringe worthy in my opinion without more of a setup. Another extremely dissatisfied part of the story is the weapon that is used at the end of the story. That was so lackluster that I rolled my eyes. I was on Shara’s side and wanted her to succeed through out the story. She was a well written character but I still think a secondary viewpoint would have made her character seem more mysterious and intriguing to understand.

The last thing about City of Stairs I would like to talk about is how familiar it is to anime. I’m not sure if Bennett is an anime fan but the setup, introduction to the characters, the flashbacks, the exposition during events, and even the city itself all seemed like something taken from an anime. Maybe it is just me because I have watched a far share of anime but even the names seemed anime in nature.

Bennett does have a future ahead of him though. The setting of the story was its strength and that should of been focused more so than anything else. It has me wanting to read another series that has active gods in it. I’ve always enjoyed the idea of multiple gods with varying personalities, so City of Stairs intrigued me. However, the delivery fell short, but there were times when I really was enjoying the book. I was really into it at times but then it would just fall flat, become interesting again, and fall flat again. I would recommend the book but I would let the potential reader know that it has a lot of short comings.

House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski is a love letter to what fear is and its effect on us. I wanted to read a scary book for October and this is the book I went with. This is not simply a book that is read but a book that is experienced. Most book’s formats are set in stone, normal paragraphs, normal chapters, and the blank space is correct. House of Leaves uses blank space on the page and the formatting of the words to convey the feeling and setting of the pages being read. For example, a passage about a small opening that continuously gets smaller is a small block of text in the middle of your page that gets smaller and smaller from page to page. The content of the book is anxiety and claustrophobic ridden and the actual formatting of the book displays that feeling on the page, creating anxiety within the reader.

House of Leaves is about a young man named Johnny that investigates the home of a recently deceased older man named Zampano. Johnny discovers a pile of typed and written pages that the man has been working on for what seems to be years. It is obvious that Zampano suffered from some sort of mental illness from the state of his residence. In the pages is the academic style workings of an uncompleted book. The book is being written about a fictional documentary called The Navidson Report. Johnny decides to take it upon himself to finish the book that Zampano started.

The Navidson Report itself is about a house owned by a famous photographer and explorer named Will Navidson that moves to a new home with his family to reconnect with his wife and children. They soon find that their house is not what it seems to be. Inside the house is a hallway that is impossibly larger than what the actual house can sustain. He then gets help to explore the inside of the house and because he is a photographer he video tapes all of the explorations.

While reading House of Leaves it is difficult to remember that all of this is fiction, every part of the story, because there are a lot of quotations and citations of actual books and people in our own world. There are also a plethora of made up quotations and books as well. When we read non-fiction writing it is almost automatic that we take it for truth. This amps up the fear for the reader because is seems more real, just as Paranormal Activity seemed more real because it was a documentary style movie.

Johnny’s decent into madness and paranoia while putting together House of Leaves is psychologically disturbing. We can see that he is losing grip on reality and it is rather unsettling. The fear that the explorers encounter in the house will keep you turning the pages well later than you meant to read. One of the most satisfying parts of the book is the relationship between Navidson and his girl-friend/future wife Karen. It is a complicated relationship made more complicated by Navidson’s desire to explore the unknown. Navidson’s relationship with his brother Tom is also one of the best parts of the story. They are twins but they are polar opposites in every way. Their journey together make two brothers that didn’t know each other very well become good friends.

House of Leaves bogs down at times in the academic chapters that try to explain what and why in relation to the house and the cast but the non-fiction feeling of these chapters bring the house alive, which in turn make the fear more real. Johnny’s own story, told alongside the Navidson Report, is a great companion story. We the reader have to decide a lot of the holes ourselves and that is one of the traits of House of Leaves that many lovers of the book enjoy the most. There are websites and forums all over the internet that discuss the book and try to find meaning within its secrets.

I highly recommend House of Leaves for people wanting to read a book that is unnerving and downright anxiety ridden. Though the content can be difficult to read at times and sometimes even annoying, the suspense is amazing when reading about the inside of the house. I could see myself rereading this in a few years time.

This book has explicit language through out and may not be for everyone.

This article is all about book collecting. I will attempt to explain how to look and see if a book is a first edition, first printing, and if it might be worth something.

What is a first edition?

A first edition is simply the very first time a book has appeared in hardback from the original publisher. If a hardcover edition was released in the U.K. before the U.S. then the U.K. version is considered the true first edition.

The publisher only makes another edition of a book when there are substantial changes made to that book, usually the actual content.

Sometimes other publishers pick up the book and publish their own first edition but the only true first edition is the very first published hard copy of the book. So if there is another copyright that is older than the current one, that older copyright is the first publisher.

The book will usually say First Edition with the date. A good rule of thumb is that if it has more than one date listed on the copyright page, it is not a first edition. It will sometimes say revised edition for later editions too.

If it is an older book, check to see if the date on the title page matches the date on the copyright page. If they do not match, then it is a later edition.

What is a first printing?

A printing of a book is the first print run of a book. For example a publisher might have a first print run of 25,000 copies. After those 25,000 copies are sold and they want to put more on the market, they will make a second printing.

A number line at the bottom of the copyright page is what gives you information about the printing.

A true first printing will have the entire number line of 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

If it ends with a 2, it is the second print run, 3, the third, ect.

For example, I see first edition hardbacks of A Fault in Our Stars everywhere but they are up to like the 40th printing.

First printings are usually the only things worth anything and are collected. However, if print runs were small for a release, later printings might be worth something to some collectors. Also, the more a first edition, first printing of a book is worth, the bigger of a chance that later printings will also be worth something.

What are Book Club Editions?

Book Club Editions are basically worthless hardcover editions to collectors. Book club editions might even state that they are a first edition because they use the same plates as regular editions. BCEs usually have a worse binding, cheaper paper, and ink isn’t as clear. The easiest way to know if something is a book club edition is the following:

Smaller-size

Edited copyright page

Dust jacket looks like the paperback cover

Poor binding(no cloth in between)

No dates

No ISBN

No price on the inside dust jacket

No barcode on the back of the dust jacket

The book’s endpapers may be white instead of color

There might be a stamp on the back cover of a hardcover BCE near the spine.

Library book editions of hardbacks are usually done by a secondary publisher as well and are not worth anything. The same rules apply to library books as to BCEs.

State of Books

State of books usually change based on the dust jacket. For example, if a publisher decides to charge $1 more for their book, they might make a new state of the book, but it is still the same printing. This is where some research comes in. The most collected is the original state of the book. Even a “signed copy” sticker on the front of a new release would be considered a second state edition. If the dust jacket changes at all without a new printing or edition, it is a different state.

A Game of Thrones example:

Now it is time for an example.

A Game of Thrones was published in the U.K by Voyager/Harper Collins in 1996

The U.S. Version was released by NY:Bantam in 1996

There is some debate as to which is the first real first edition. The U.K. version came out 3 weeks before the U.S. version but the U.S. version went to print earlier to give out copies at the ABA. The U.K. had a much smaller print run than the U.S. version, making the U.K. version worth more.

U.K. version is worth about $1,500 while the U.S. version is worth about $800. These are near fine quality prices.

The condition a book is in makes a huge deal on price. For example, the very first edition and first printing of the Lord of the Rings trilogy can go for $50,000 if it is in perfect shape. If the same exact books have a stain on the spine, or small rubbing on the dust jacket, that set might be only worth $25,000. If the quality is even lower, as in possible small tears on the dust jacket we are talking about a price point of about $12,000. So quality makes a huge difference.

Collectible Book Websites:

http://www.abebooks.com/

http://www.biblio.com/

http://www.alibris.com/books/rare-collectible

Progress

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March Habits:
20 mins of exercise a day
1 hour of reading nonfiction a day
A day failed = $10 donated to the library
Successfully go the whole month = 1 new book buy.